


nyctophobia

by aubadechild



Series: ShuAke Confidant Week 2018 [7]
Category: Persona 5
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, M/M, Reunions, Time Skips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-05
Updated: 2018-11-05
Packaged: 2019-08-19 05:36:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16528415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aubadechild/pseuds/aubadechild
Summary: Years after the mysterious disappearance of Akechi Goro, Akira still believes that someone knows what really happened to him, that traces of his existence must still be present, that he has simply gone missing. Desperate for answers, for something to cling on to, he creates a website dedicated to discovering the truth.And that's when he receives a mysterious email.{ mini-fic written for Shuake Confidant Week 2018 Day Seven. }





	nyctophobia

 By the age of twenty-three Akira had developed a fully-fledged fear of the dark.

Clutching a crumpled piece of paper with an address blurred into its creases by the torrential downpour, Akira trembled as he stared into the mouth of oblivion that was the unlit back alley stretching before him like the maw of some great beast. He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and dragged a wet sleeve across his eyes, which served only to exacerbate the haze fogging up his lenses, and sucked in a sniffle-choked breath through congested nostrils. Each step forward into the dark drove the hilt of some strange dagger further and further into the pliant muscle of his heart, until now, standing here, he could feel the tip of the blade coming out the other side. _Anxiety,_ he thought to himself. _That’s all this is._ But at the end of this lightless place waited something that he hoped, he _prayed_ would be worth the trip.

* * *

 _Yeah_ , he’d often told his therapist, _I_ know _it’s ridiculous_. Of course, in seeking help he could only speak of his escapades as leader of the Phantom Thieves in the vaguest of terms, playing off his experiences in the cognitive world as strictly metaphorical (descriptions which often seemed to surprise his counselor with their “colorful and imaginative insights” as to his mental state). He had navigated an entire wing of Sae’s Palace using nothing but his sixth sense to feel out the vague edges of a pitch-black maze where Shadows lurked around every corner, and one misstep could spell the death of his entire party. The dark hadn’t gotten him then. He had stood before a great dark and watched it burn, listened as it tempted him with a power he narrowly avoided accepting. He had seen the twisted dark of humanity and still elected to free them from the shackles they had chosen to wear.

In the end it had been a simple, fangless dark that had swallowed him whole. This dark had crept into his room in the evenings and hung itself like cobwebs from the walls, passive and silent. And like any merciful creature with a mouth, it had digested him slowly, greeted him with a constriction that he mistook for an embrace for a period of five long years, until one day he awoke in the middle of the night unable to breathe, already half-consumed. 

The dark had gotten in him, and it scared him into insomnia. It manifested itself in circles beneath his eyes. He kept the lamps on even during the rare occasions that the universe took pity on him and allowed him rest, and his computer monitor flickered next to him in unnatural blue light. 

 _#JusticeForAkechiGoro_ , it always showed, in a white, bold sans-serif font. 

With Futaba’s help, Akira had built a website.

Upon his so-called “demise”, the public’s perception of Akechi Goro petered out into nonexistence. Even in the weeks following the destruction of humanity’s collective subconscious, Akira found he could go days without catching a single mention of the student detective’s name, when before he had hardly been able to walk down the street without overhearing someone’s opinion on him. Almost overnight Akechi’s face had disappeared from television, and commercials of him had quickly stopped airing altogether.

But unlike the public, Akira hadn’t forgotten. 

He had always been a tad obsessive when it came to achieving his goals, so with the surplus of downtime he was left with in the wake of the Phantom Thieves’ dissolution, he had slowly begun to assemble a motley online group of conspiracy theorists, paranormal investigators, fledgeling private eyes, and still-devoted fans in the hopes that their combined efforts might yield some kind of answer as to what exactly had happened to Akechi Goro.

The first email had come almost five years later, around the midpoint of May, a month before he found himself shaking on a Tokyo backstreet.

Well, it hadn’t been the _first_ email, of course. Much like other online communities dedicated to tracking down missing persons, _JusticeForAkechiGoro_ saw numerous red herrings, pranks, and dead ends. Akira had learned that fast. But this one had stood out amongst a deluge of false tips. This one had been different. It had been addressed to “Joker”, (a name that Akira, quote, “hadn’t heard in years” according to Futaba, who had then devolved into a fit of laughter), and was relatively long-winded—these kinds of messages often were—but chock-full of details that made a weary, blanket-clad Akira furrow his brow and scratch at the burgeoning stubble dotting his jawline. _Akechi Goro is still alive,_ it had claimed. At the end of it, bleary-eyed and weakened by exhaustion, Akira’d had to convince his addled brain that the email had not, in fact, been penned by Akechi Goro himself. 

It had concluded: _Meet me at the attached location on June 10th at precisely 11:00 PM, and I will tell you all that you wish to know._

Akira had spent the subsequent month going back and forth as to whether or not he had the emotional capacity to withstand the inevitable disappointment when this turned out to be yet another hoax.

“But what if you _don’t_ go, and it turns out it _was_ something?” Futaba had reminded him during one of their frequent Skype calls. 

“Then I’d probably never find out, so I’d just be in the same place I am now,” Akira had grumbled into the microphone. 

“Well, fine. Don’t go, then! But just remember, there’s a chance this informant could crack our case wide open!” 

* * *

In his heart Akira had known that she was right, so with courage borrowed from his past self and energy borrowed from the future, he stepped forward into the dark of this alley and kept walking, grim resolve set across his features. He arrived almost perfectly on time, reaching the alley’s dead end with a mere two minutes to spare. 

He waited. Two minutes came and went. Just as he began to suspect he’d been duped—or worse: set up for some kind of overly elaborate mugging—he heard the sound of metal clanging against itself and an obscured form in the vague shape of a man appeared beside him, slightly hunched. 

“You must be Joker,” said the other party, and the voice rang familiar in a way Akira had half expected it to all along, though it still froze his veins to hear. “I’m surprised you came.” 

“My name is Kurusu Akira,” Akira told him. “I don’t think I ever got your name.”

“My name is of no consequence to you. I’m inclined to believe it never was.”

Akira wrinkled his nose. “I guess I’ll just refer to you as _rude_. But let’s cut to the chase, Akechi. You said you had some information that I might find interesting. That you didn’t want anything—no money, nothing. Just someone to listen to your story. To hear you out. Is that correct?” 

In the gloom Akira could just make out the figure nodding. 

“That’s correct. All I ask of you in exchange is that you not publish it. What I tell you stays between us.” 

“I can agree to those terms. And I’ll listen as long as you’d like. But I just find it funny.”

“And what’s so funny to you?” 

Akira paused, tried and failed to banish the ridiculous smile from gathering momentum across his face. It was easier to indulge it; after all, the dark concealed how his features betrayed his relief, and it softened both their edges, turned them into disembodied voices murmuring secrets in the night. They were just words in the air, two dead men reuniting for the first time in years, pretending to be strangers because it was easier to play the part than to accept that they truly had become strangers. _All this work, and what for, old friend?_

“That you didn’t even flinch when I said your name,” Akira replied after a moment, and high overhead, a light flickered on in a window.

**Author's Note:**

> writing? editing? i don't know her


End file.
